Back in my days, Engrish was part of the anime experience. I still remember fondly the DANGAR text on the gas canisters that made hilarious what was supposed to be a dramatic sequence in Zeta Gundam.
It wasn't just in Anime because video games had them too.
Is there anyone alive that doesn't know about Zero Wing's hilarious flubb? Here's a refresher:
"All your base are belong to us" <-It has its own Wikipedia Page!
On it's Wikipedia page, there are other gems that I had forgotten about like:
Correct Translation: It appears someone has planted explosives.
Translation Used: Somebody set up us the bomb.
and
Correct Translation: Treasure what little time you have left to live.
Translation Used: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Of course, Zero Wing came out in 1989 and since the world wasn't even remotely as globalised as it is now, I found it funny but I didn't really blame them (and I'm sure that their worst
Engrish is better than my best Japanese ever was).
And then... I encountered it again in 2006 in Ace Combat Zero...
There was a mission in which one of the operations was called "Operation Broom" but the voice (which spoke English like a born American or Canadian) said (quite clearly) "Operation Bloom". 🤦♂️
I thought for certain that this was the last time I would encounter something like this until I played
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. It wasn't so much a matter of
Engrish as it was an incorrect pluralisation of a word. As my name suggests, I'm a big aviation enthusiast and there are few things more grating to my ears than when someone says the non-word "aircraft
s". The plural of the word
aircraft is
aircraft, not
aircrafts!
There is no graphical glitch that can be as jarring and immersion-breaking than hearing a character who is supposed to be your flight lead making a child's grammar mistake that
nobody in aviation would
ever make and this game came out in 2019 so Namco has no excuse.
A lot of people here aren't old enough to remember that, back in the 80s, Engrish could actually be quite problematic. I remember reading a manual for setting up a motherboard that my father had (back then you had to physically set DIP switches and jumpers for
everything). I remember reading something like this:
"
Important!: If you see jumper 4 is then stop!"
This was pretty alarming because it said "
Important!" but to this day, I have no idea what it was that was so important. Just imagine setting up a motherboard after having read this and having
no way of figuring out what it means. I don't remember anything bad coming of it but I can just imagine what my dad was like while setting that board up:
Keep in mind that back then, things cost more they do now but they cost more in 1980s dollars which only made things worse. Like, an ATi EGA Wonder was close to $700CAD back then.
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